The House of Bernarda Alba E-Book

Federico García Lorca

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 112

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Federico García Lorca's extraordinarily powerful drama, the last he wrote before his assassination, explores the darkness at the heart of repression. When Bernarda's husband dies, she locks all the doors and windows. She tells her grown-up daughters to sew and be silent. 'There are eight years of mourning ahead of us. While it lasts not even the wind will get into this house.' But locks can't hold back the growing tide of desire. This English version of The House of Bernarda Alba, published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Jo Clifford, and also contains a chronology and suggestions for further reading.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE HOUSE OFBERNARDA ALBA

byFederico García Lorca

translated and introduced by Jo Clifford

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Lorca: Key Dates

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Translator’s Note

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)

Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898. The year was a hugely significant one in Spanish cultural and political history: it gave its name to a whole generation of writers who used the events of this year as a rallying cry in efforts to convince the Spanish people of their country’s deplorable state and the desperate need for re-evaluation and change. They were called the ‘Generation of ’98’, and they included Azorín, Baroja and Ángel Ganivet.

The historical event that inspired this movement was the disastrous war with the United States, which led to the loss of Cuba, Spain’s last remaining colony. This apparently distant event was to have huge repercussions for Lorca. Cuba had been Spain’s principal source of sugar; Lorca’s father was to be astute enough to plant his land in Southern Spain with sugar beet, and so, with the aid of a series of successful land purchases, he was well placed to become one of the richest men in the Fuente Vaqueros district.

A long-term consequence of this was that Lorca himself never needed to earn his own living. There’s no question this wealthy background contributed both to the large volume, and the technical and emotional daring, of his work. As it happened, Blood Wedding in particular was hugely successful; but the financial security of his position left him absolutely free to write as he wanted without regard to the demands of the commercial theatre of his day.

However, the most immediate consequence for the young Lorca was that this meant he spent his childhood as the rich son of the wealthiest landowner of a mainly poor village.

Perhaps the best way for us to imagine the impact of this on Lorca’s sensibility is to think of our own feelings towards the desperately poor of the developing world – or the homeless that many of us pass each day on the street. The contrast between his wealth and the poverty of so many of those around him left a deep impression on Lorca, which he was to express in later life in his autobiographical essay ‘My Village’.

The plight of one family affected Lorca particularly deeply. One of his friends in the village was a little girl whose father was a chronically ill day-labourer and whose mother was the exhausted victim of countless pregnancies. The one day on which Federico was not allowed to visit their home was washing day: the members of this family had only one set of clothes, and they had to stay inside their house while their only clothes were being washed and dried. Lorca wrote:

When I returned home on those occasions, I would look into the wardrobe, full of clean, fragrant clothes, and feel dreadfully anxious, with a dead weight on my heart.

He grew up with a profound sense of indignation at the injustice of this:

No one dares to ask for what he needs. No one dares… to demand bread. And I who say this grew up among these thwarted lives. I protest against this mistreatment of those who work the land.

The young man who wrote this protest at the end of his adolescence maintained a profound anger right to the end of his life. In an interview he gave in 1936, the year of his death, he stated: ‘As long as there is economic injustice in the world, the world will be unable to think clearly.’

He continued the interview with a fable to illustrate the difficulties of creating valid art in a situation of economic injustice:

Two men are walking along a riverbank. One of them is rich, the other poor. One has a full belly and the other fouls the air with his yawns. And the rich man says: ‘What a lovely little boat out on the water! Look at that lily blooming on the bank!’ And the poor man wails: ‘I’m hungry, so hungry!’ Of course. The day when hunger is eradicated there is going to be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever seen. I’m talking like a real socialist, aren’t I?

For Lorca, the art of creating theatre was totally bound up with the process of creating a better society:

The idea of art for art’s sake is something that would be cruel if it weren’t, fortunately, so ridiculous. No decent person believes any longer in all that nonsense about pure art, art for art’s sake. At this dramatic moment in time, the artist should laugh and cry with his people. We must put down the bouquet of lilies and bury ourselves up to the waist in mud to help those who are looking for lilies. For myself, I have a genuine need to communicate with others. That’s why I knocked at the door of the theatre and why I now devote all my talents to it.

This passionate anger at the injustice of human society combined with an equally passionate determination to create art that might remedy it was fuelled not simply by his childhood experiences. As an adult, he had travelled to New York, and witnessed at first hand the devastating impact of the Wall Street Crash:

It’s the spectacle of all the world’s money in all its splendour, its mad abandon and its cruelty… This is where I have got a clear idea of what a huge mass of people fighting to make money is really like. The truth is that it’s an international war with just a thin veneer of courtesy… We ate breakfast on a thirty-second floor with the head of a bank, a charming person with a cold and feline side – quite English. People came in there after being paid. They were all counting dollars. Their hands all had the characteristic tremble that holding money gives them… Colin [an acquaintance] had five dollars in his purse and I three. Despite this he said to me: ‘We’re surrounded by millions and yet the only two decent people here are you and I.’

And when Lorca writes so angrily of the ‘thwarted lives’ of those whose existence is dominated by money, it is clear he is thinking not simply of the plight of the rural poor, but also of the bourgeoisie to which he himself, and many of us, now belong. He is concerned not simply with the suffering that a wealthy middle class inflicts on those beneath them on the social scale; he is equally concerned with the suffering they inflict upon themselves. The ‘thwarted lives’ he saw in his village are not simply those of the poor.

The House of Bernarda Alba: What Happens in the Play

Act One   Offstage, the bells are tolling for Bernarda’s second husband’s funeral. La Poncia, Bernarda’s housekeeper, is eating a sausage she stole from the larder. The (unnamed) maid is scrubbing the floor. Both share a common hatred for Bernarda, who is tight-fisted and domineering. La Poncia has been working for her for thirty years, and dreams of the humiliations she would like to inflict on her in revenge. A major anxiety for both is that the house be spotlessly clean; and that Bernarda’s mad mother, María Josefa, stay safely under lock and key.

La Poncia leaves to catch the last responses in church; the maid brutally repulses a hungry beggar woman, continues cleaning, cursing the dead man as she does so. It’s the last time he’ll molest her behind the stable door.

As Bernarda enters, she bursts into passionate weeping. The whole stage fills with women in black. In the midst of pious conversation, they gossip viciously behind Bernarda’s back. Bernarda curses the women after they have gone. She lays down the law to her daughters: mourning will last for eight years. Eight years of utter seclusion.

But there is an immediate threat to her control: the eldest daughter, Angustias, has been seen watching the men through the house door’s iron grille. Bernarda calls her in and slaps her. She sends her daughters off to their rooms; and La Poncia tells Bernarda the men were talking about a village girl who was gang-raped the previous night.

We have a strong sense of a world where the double standard rules: men are allowed free expression of their sexuality, while women must repress theirs.

Bernarda goes to see the lawyer to discuss the terms of her late husband’s will.

As an act of rebellion, Adela, the youngest, has changed into a green dress. The other sisters talk of the rumour that Pepe el Romano, the most eligible bachelor of the district, is going to propose marriage to Angustias. Besides being the eldest, she is also the richest, because she inherits from her father, Bernarda’s first husband. It becomes clear that Adela loves Pepe, and may be in a relationship with him, and that there is bitter rivalry between the sisters. The girls then rush off to catch a glimpse of Pepe walking down the street.

Bernarda sees Angustias with make-up on her face, and violently rubs it off. The sisters rush on to see what the conflict is. At that moment, María Josefa appears, dressed in faded finery. She’s going to escape from this prison and live with a man by the shores of the sea. Bernarda and her daughters join to drag the mad, suffering old woman back into confinement.

Act Two   The sisters are doing their embroidery. All seems calm. Angustias’s engagement to Pepe is now official. As custom dictates, he comes each night to converse with her through the metal grille of her window. Adela is in her room, alone; they all have noticed her agitation and distress. There is also an unexplained discrepancy around the time he leaves Angustias. She says it is around one a.m.; but others say he has been heard leaving at around four. The woman go off to see a travelling salesman who deals in lace. Adela is left alone with La Poncia. She tells her she wants Pepe and means to have him. She will not allow anyone to stop her. La Poncia advises her to wait. Angustias is sickly and narrow-hipped. The first childbirth will kill her. Then Pepe will return for Adela. But Adela will not wait. It is clear she and Angustius are in a state of war.

The sisters return. It is midday. The heat suffocates. A gang of itinerant labourers have come to harvest the fields. They hired a prostitute the previous night. All hear them singing as they come back from the fields.

Angustias breaks the stillness in a state of fury. Someone has taken Pepe’s photograph from her room. Bernarda orders La Poncia to search the girls’ rooms. There is an expectation it will be found in Adela’s; but it turns out it is the hunchbacked sister, Martirio, who has stolen it. Bernarda beats her, and there is an explosion of jealous fury betwen Martirio and Adela. Bernarda, in fury, sends the sisters back to their rooms.

Alone together, La Poncia hints to Bernarda about a scandal she suspects is about to break over Bernarda’s head. Bernarda retaliates by reminding La Poncia of the knowledge she has of the scandal surrounding her – and fiercely asserts her confidence in her ability to control events. La Poncia artfully remarks that it’s wonderful how keen Pepe is on his new fiancée, since he stays talking to her till four in the morning. Angustias denies this: Martirio corroborates it. We have a sense that the sisters have been overhearing everything; we know for sure that Adela has, in fact, been seeing Pepe; and we sense her secret is in danger of being revealed.

A tumult in the street diverts everyone’s attention. Adela and Martirio snatch a moment together. Martirio also loves Pepe and is determined to prevent Adela having him. This is another declaration of open war.

The stage fills again as La La Poncia reveals what she has just heard: an unmarried girl in the village secretly gave birth to an illegitimate child and killed it to hide her shame. The village dogs uncovered the child’s corpse from under a heap of stones. A mob is forming to lynch the mother. Adela clutches her belly. We know she is pregnant. Bernarda shouts at the mob to act fast before the police come – and urges them to kill the girl.

Act Three   All seems quiet again as the daughters eat their evening meal. Someone has come to visit; and from the woman’s conventional words we catch a glimpse of a life lived in unresolved misery, whose anguish is tucked away out of sight – but never out of mind. The night is dark; the stars are big as fists; a stallion is trying to kick his way out of the stable.

Bernarda is sure she has the situation under control. But the talk between Bernarda and the maid after she has gone to bed suggests otherwise.

The Grandmother appears, singing to a baby lamb. Martirio persuades her back to bed in a scene of the profoundest fear and pathos. The hatred between Martirio and Adela is coming irresistibly out into the open, as is the fact that Adela and Pepe are having intercourse together. At a crucial moment of conflict between the two sisters, we hear a man whistle. It is Pepe; this is the signal for Adela to join him; Martirio prevents her leaving.